I’m writing this to inform you, my friends and fellow honest writers. of this hazard. THIS IS A FAKE TWITTER ACCOUNT using my name illegally. I have no idea who it is. If you ever encounter it, DO NOT CLICK on it. If you want to know me, or anything about me, you’re welcome to email me personally, at "contact at victoriachames dot com" or visit either of my writer websites: Writer To Writer, http://w2w.victoriachames.com - or my personal blog, More About This- http://moreaboutthis.wordpress.com I did have a Twitter acct, which I have deleted now. I want NO PART of this thing.

When I "Googled" myself as part of building my Author Platform, I discovered a FALSE twitter account in MY NAME, which when clicked on, it instantly installed a “virus” or “witch” onto my laptop which rendered it inoperable, and cost me about $100 in repair costs to get rid of. I don’t want anyone looking me up to fall into this trap, so I filed a complaint with Twitter demanding that they remove it. They made me send copies of my driver's license and other private information to prove I was myself, which obviously they had NOT done to this guy, whoever he is. To my shock and horror, when I reported this to support@twitter.com and jumped thru all their hoops to get Twitter to take it down, THEY REFUSED! They responded:

Hello, We've investigated the reported account and have determined that it is not in violation of Twitter’s impersonation policy. In order for an account to be in violation of the policy, it must portray another person or business in a misleading or deceptive manner. (It certainly does!!!)

And worse, as the day went on, I also discovered that a chapbook I self-published a few years ago is now up for download, for free, on at least 2 "readers" websites, with all sorts of books being downloadable by anybody for free. These two sites appear to be located in some foreign country, possibly China, though not connected to each other. They had no way to report plagiarism ar theft. One had a "contact form" for this, but it does not SEND. It leads repeatedly to a page that says "Go back." I tried dozens of times and wasted a lot of very frustrating time on this.

There may be thousands of such sites, and I don't know if there is any way to protect ourselves from this, except to NOT put ANYTHING onto the web anywhere (even robots-noindex pages can be hacked) except password-protected pages, shared only with people you know and trust, and with a printed log-record of who went there, and when. There is a good one and it's free- at Bravenet dot com, in Canada. It's a system easy to set up and use, that prevents anyone or any search engine from accessing your pages without a username and password controlled entirely by you.

All of this is so sad and sickening. It's more of that same mentality we're seeing on TV every day, that now it's okay and cool to steal, lie, assault, and kill. Just for the fun of it. Those websites didn't even make any money on this, but they destroyed my right to publish this work anywhere for payment, since it's no longer exclusive - at all.

Beware. Take care how you share. The sharks are invisible, until they strike.